Skip to main content

Tesla Autopilot feature helps driver get safely to hospital

US driver Joshua Neally made it to safely to hospital by putting his Tesla Model X into Autopilot mode when he suffered what was later diagnosed as a pulmonary embolism. The lawyer was travelling home in growing rush-hour traffic when he began to suffer severe pain in his chest and stomach. Instead of calling an ambulance he used the car’s self-drive mode to negotiate the 20 miles to the nearest hospital. He told Slate that he manually steered it into the parking lot and checked himself into the emergenc
August 10, 2016 Read time: 1 min
US driver Joshua Neally made it to safely to hospital by putting his Tesla Model X into Autopilot mode when he suffered what was later diagnosed as a pulmonary embolism.

The lawyer was travelling home in growing rush-hour traffic when he began to suffer severe pain in his chest and stomach. Instead of calling an ambulance he used the car’s self-drive mode to negotiate the 20 miles to the nearest hospital. He told Slate that he manually steered it into the parking lot and checked himself into the emergency room, where he was promptly treated.

Tesla’s Autopilot is under scrutiny after the driver of a Tesla crashed into a truck in Florida while using the feature. The crash is still under investigation.

Related Content

  • August 24, 2021
    Transit’s Covid clean-up operation
    The onset of Covid-19 saw ridership on public transport slump drastically. How will the organisations that provide these essential services persuade customers back on board?
  • April 20, 2017
    Increased automation is already improving road safety
    Richard Cuerden considers how many of the technologies developed as part of a move toward autonomous vehicles are already being deployed as ADAS improve road safety. The drive to create autonomous vehicles has caused a re-evaluation of what is needed to safely navigate today’s roads and the development of systems that can replace the driver in many scenarios. However, many manufacturers are not waiting for ‘tomorrow’ and are already incorporating these systems in their new cars as Advanced Driver Assistanc
  • October 17, 2019
    Getting C/AVs from pipedream to reality
    The UK government has suggested that driverless cars could be on the roads by 2021. But designers and engineers are grappling with a number of difficult issues, muses Chris Hayhurst of MathWorks Earlier this year, the UK government made the bold statement that by 2021, driverless cars will be on the UK’s roads. But is this an achievable reality? Driverless technology already has its use cases on our roads, with levels of autonomy ranked on a scale. At one end of the spectrum, level 1 is defined by th
  • October 22, 2018
    Interoperability: towards the new frontier
    After six years of intensive research, testing and negotiation, the US tolling industry is well on its way to groundbreaking results in the effort to establish regional - and eventually national - toll interoperability, says IBTTA’s Bill Cramer. Interoperability has been a high priority on the US tolling industry’s agenda for more than a decade. But several factors made it a uniquely complex issue to resolve - including the number of agencies involved, the significant investments those agencies had already